My Review of "Don't Look Up"

Don't Look up is Netflix's newest 2021 blockbuster movie. It's hotly anticipated because of the amount of celebrities in this movie. However you'll notice all of the celebrities that have climbed on this project are all social activists. I had a sense of what I was getting myself into when I pressed play for this one.

The movie starts off with a student named Kate. She's a PhD candidate (it's mentioned about 100 times in the movie) in astronomy. She's looking at the stars when all of a sudden she discovers a gigantic comet hurdling for Earth. At first she's excited because of the grand discovery but after some mathematical equations she's mortified.

She estimates this comet which later gets named after her will destroy the earth within 6 months. Devastated she brings this information to her professor Randall. He concurs with Kates findings and is equally distressed. The two of course want to warn the world and try to get the government to do something about it but some things are easier said than done.

This whole movie is based on their adventures trying to spread the truth about the comet. We see a whole bunch of politics that come out of this whole ordeal that feel closer to home than we expect. In fact this whole movie could be a metaphor for our current pandemic situation.

When they try to reveal the truth to persons of power or the media they aren't ever taken seriously. People are more wrapped up about relationships with certain celebrities than the whole end of the world thing. We have definitely seen this situation in real life when the White House had released evidence of actual UFO's last year in 2020. No one batted an eye about this and went about their daily lives.

We also see politicians and business people trying to take advantage of the situation in today's pandemic situation. The rich only got richer out of the whole pandemic. These parallels to this movie made me think maybe this was an allegory to today's society and social values.

This movie was even able to explain why certain people don't believe the truth even though it's right in front of you in physical form. I'm sure many of the scenes in this movie are based off of real life situations.

They even dive into other unspoken issues in society. There was a scene where they talk about our own inequality of attention to males as we do for females. It even dives a bit deeper into the celebrity of this attention making people forget who they are and become different people.

I could see how all of the characters could be based on real life people. Their actions and reactions are very genuine not only because of the acting but because they're written very well. This movie has a very good understanding of social realities in how we interact with one another. It's quite scary at times but funny because they called us out on everything we do.

All of the scenes are so well made to make us believe that they would actually happen if this should happen today in our real world. I believed most of it too. A lot of what this movie says is actually true. These chain of events could very well happen and may have already happened in the case of the pandemic.

I do have issues with them isolating the issues to the United States only though. They did mention that other countries around the world did try to attempt to do something but their example wasn't very realistic. There's no way the rest of the world would sit idly waiting for the Americans to solve the problems of the world. This movie focused solely on the American attitudes and actions. Should an event like this actually happen, there would be a far more complicated story.

That's why I have to forgive them for this issue. This is a satirical portrayal of North American culture with a movie runtime. It's a great concept that works. A lot of people will find this funny because of the outrageousness of the whole ordeal however some people will also think that the timing of the movie is too close to home.

Overall, it's not for everyone but I did have a good time watching this movie. I wouldn't say I would watch this movie over and over again but I can see how politically charged individuals would eat this movie all up. They talk a lot about politics and feed off our own political standings to have us watch this movie. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. People will come for the celebrities but will come out with an introspection of how our society behaves during crisis.